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IT Managers Worry More about End-user Abuse

As per a latest research, the IT managers get more worried because of end-user abuses of the systems of IT than assaults from hackers and other dangers.

Websense, a security vendor, sponsored the State of Security Report of 2007. The report was based on a survey conducted on around 159 Information Technology managers and 158 employees at companies in Australia with over 50 staff.

The study also revealed that the management of the end-user's activities on the net is the most frustrating part of IT managers' job. Amongst the surveyed companies, around 59% do not block the sharing of P2P data, and 49% do not employ the policy for Internet usage through the filtering applications.

48% of IT managers reported that the budget limitations are their next concern. The other areas of concerns are negligent attention given to security (around 25%) and easy deployments (almost 18%).

Joel Camissar, Australia-New Zealand Country Manager for Websense, said that people spent good amount of time working on the Internet. And this increases the IT managers' and customers' security concerns. Computerworld published this news on October 29, 2007.

The study also revealed that the employees spend around 85.3 minutes every day over net for business purposes, and almost 45.1 minutes for personal use. The IT managers consider the scenario positive; they anticipated that their employees are spending around 89.5 minutes on personal net use per working day.

Besides that, around 53% of the surveyed employees revealed that they e-mailed work documents in their personal accounts, 20% of them opened e-mails from unknown persons, almost 17% had clicked on the pop-up add links, 3% of them gambled on the Internet, and 8% had viewed sites for adults. And 1% of the surveyed employees have deliberately sent enterprises' private data.

The employees at the firms know that indulging in such activities could cost them their jobs. Around 74% employees believed circulating firm's confidential information to be a dismissible crime. Also, almost 73% employees thought watching adult materials is an offense enough to cost an employee his job.

Joel Camissar also said that organizations taking external measures are doing a sensible work, but they should also secure themselves from internal threats, especially the way in which the confidential data gets leaked.